A-Series Keyboards : Setting Up A Sustain Pedal

LeeG

Following an exchange with one of NI's helpful Moderators and having resolved my specific issue, I have deleted the original discussion posted here as it may have been counterproductive for others.

Jeremy_NI

Hey @LeeG Here is our article on how to setup sustain pedals.

How to Configure Sustain / Expression Pedals on KOMPLETE KONTROL Keyboards

It has worked for most of our users, what model is your sustain pedal ?

dsr

You shouldn't need a separate manual to have a sustain pedal simply work on a ****** piano midi controller keyboard. It should just ****** work.

LeeG

Hi DSR. I couldn't agree more. In fact, I got a reply from one of the NI moderators referring me to the official guide. If your interested, my reply was ...

"Hi Jeremy. Thanks for your reply. The first thing that I did when my A-49 did not 'plugin and play' was to try my old (and very basic) IK Rigs keyboard which worked straight away with KK along with the sustain pedal working just as it always has done. I went through the NI official guide which simply didn't work. I actually tested the NI guide settings using the midi editor in my DAW and it confirmed that the pedal was transmitting on MC 65 and not MC 64 as it should. As my post said, I resolved the issue with a different midi setting in KK that did transmit on-off through KK on MC 64. And seeing as you asked, my sustain pedal is a good quality universal one - M-Audio (M-Gear) piano style. Regards ... "

Jeremy_NI

Hey @LeeG I will write what I already answered in private. If your pedal is a M-Audio SP2, there is a switch polarity underneath it. if polarity is reversed, then instead of CC64 for tip and CC65 for ring you would get the opposite. It's probably what happened in your case. This article in the end works for the vast majority of users. In the cases where it didn't work it was mostly defective keyboards.

Jeremy_NI

@dsr It's not a separate manual, the information is also present in the keyboard's user manual. It's a knowledge base article to help users. In most cases there is nothing to do and the sustain pedals work straight out of the box, but there are many setups that may vary and things can go wrong, the article explains how to fix these issues. No need to be rude.

audiodacious

1. Set the MIDI Channel to 1

So what we're being told here is that when we use this keyboard as a MIDI controller sustain pedal will only work for channel 1 ?

Is that instruction in the knowledge base article because this is a known issue?

So this means that if we have templates set up for various channels we cannot use the pedal on anything but channel one :(

Testing that theory here appears to hold true. ... Good grief is this by design?

Surely it's possible to fix this in as a software update?

🤔😕

Jeremy_NI

@audiodacious It's not exactly like that. You can change the MIDI channel of the sustain pedal but it will affect all templates, meaning that the sustain pedal channel is not stored with each template. Yes, unfortunately that is "by design" and it won't change.

I hope I make it clearer!